Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

I almost fell to the platform below, again calling for help on the radio, and reached it just as Bouch hit the ground. He stumbled once and took off hobbling toward the rear of the nearby crowd. As I swung my leg over the ladder’s top rung, I glimpsed the immensity of the scene before me, captured like an infrared photograph in the burst of a crimson rocket. There were thousands of people extending like an oil slick from within twenty yards of the creamery to the distant riverbank-a clotted mass of heads and shoulders as densely packed as commuters at a suburban train station. From the moment Bouch hit its outermost fringe, he became indistinguishable from his surroundings.

Of my two remaining hopes, one was that I could track him by the disturbance he’d leave in his wake, as I might a car driving through a corn field. The other was evidenced by the blood I found on every rung of the ladder. Norm Bouch was badly wounded, if only in the hand, so even if he got away this time, either the blood loss or the need for care would eventually force him to where we might find him.

My adrenaline, however, drove me to make the first option a reality. As soon as my feet touched the ground, I bolted for where I’d seen him disappear, telling the others the direction I was taking, and recommending that all exits from the Island be blocked immediately. Through my earpiece, I heard the tactical machinery switching gears; Greg Davis also thoughtfully let me know that Latour had received only a superficial wound. Emily Doyle, whose unprotected head had been in Norm’s sights, would be hard put to proclaim her chief’s uselessness in the future.

My pursuit through the crowd was like running underwater. As I’d hoped, I could track Bouch’s progress by the effects of his passage-people complaining of being shoved aside, a few still regaining their footing, others noticing to their horror the blood he’d smeared on their clothes. I didn’t endear myself to any of them with my barely gentler version of the same treatment, despite holding up my badge and muttering constant apologies. It became a chase made surreal by its molasses-slow movement, regularly pierced by strobe-like flashes of violent primary colors. My vision was reduced to a tight series of still pictures, each following the other by several seconds, and each tinged with a different hue.

Despite the pace, however, I could tell I was gaining, at times catching sight of people being jostled just a few dozen feet ahead of me. I also knew by now where we were headed. Steering up the middle of the jammed railroad yard, Norm had reduced his options to two, both of them train trestles. One was a short span over the mouth of the canal, leading directly into downtown Bellows Falls. The other, closer by, was the much longer bridge to North Walpole, parallel to and twenty feet downstream of the dam. It wasn’t until we were almost at the top of the yard that I saw Bouch cut right and head for the latter.

Still pushing through the crowd, I brought the radio once more to my mouth. “Suspect’s heading for North Walpole across the railroad br-”

I didn’t get to finish. Easing by a huge bearded man, I was seized by the shirtfront and almost lifted off my feet. His whiskers tickled my chin and his beer-soaked breath enveloped my head as he bellowed, “Goddamn it, you assholes, stop pushin’,” before tossing me away like a small discarded toy. He sent me piling up against a half dozen others, all of whom absorbed my fall with a chorus of angry yells. I lay sprawled on the ground as people milled about, trying not to step on me. Another man, smaller but just as irritated, finally bent over me and yelled, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

In response, I merely shoved my badge in his face. He backed up, said, “He’s a cop,” and a small clearing instantly formed around me. I regained my feet and took off toward the bridge.

The delay, though brief, had been crucial for Norm Bouch. By the time I reached the wooden police barricade blocking the bridge, all I could see was an empty steel trestle, its shiny metal rails glittering from the lights high above. I dropped my hand to the radio clipped to my belt and found it missing, a victim of my encounter with the bearded man.

I looked around frantically, seeing if Bouch could’ve taken another route. But the bridge, being just downstream of the dam, spanned a cauldron of lethally churning water, and the riverbank dropped straight into it.

I quickly turned to a woman sitting on the barricade. “I’m a police officer. Did you see a man go onto the bridge?”

She took her eyes off the fireworks to look at me angrily. “Sure I did. He almost knocked me over doing it. I told him he’d get busted.”

“Where did he go?”

She looked over my shoulder, her eyes blank with surprise.

Then her hand rose to her mouth. “Oh, my Lord. Did he fall in?”

It was a pertinent question. The recent rain had swollen the river almost to its crest, and the dam’s Tainter gates had been lifted to spare the canal upstream, and the hydroelectric plant it fed, from being totally overwhelmed. The tradeoff was that the bend around Bellows Falls’ man-made island-the peaceful midsummer stream I’d visited just days earlier-was now a rampaging, heaving, tumultuous torrent. Survival in its throes, and especially over the falls, seemed impossible.

I thanked the woman and stepped out onto the trestle, keenly aware of the water crashing over the dam a few yards to my left. The farther I got from shore, the more the sound of water all but eclipsed the loudest explosions overhead.

I stuck to the middle of the tracks, mindful of how the bridge’s intertwined superstructure afforded all too many hiding places, playing my flashlight into every dark corner I came to, my gun at the ready. Feeling increasingly exposed and isolated, I kept glancing ahead, hoping to see reinforcements approaching from the far shore.

But it didn’t happen. As inevitably as fate, Norm Bouch emerged as from the metal itself, an instant transformation from angular shadow to seething bundle of human rage-punching, scratching, kicking, and gouging with a fury I’d never before encountered. In my efforts to simply stay on my feet, both my gun and light went flying. Locked together like boxers in a clinch, suddenly caught in a blinding flash from the heavens, we tumbled off the bridge into the steaming waters.

We landed in a bubble bath, the water so aerated it was more foam than liquid. It drew us deep under, not supplying any resistance to swim against, and twisted us about like laundry. But while the notion of air surrounded us, it was water nevertheless, filling my nose and mouth and wrapping me in a cool, smooth, smothering cocoon.

Bouch was unaffected. His dark outline still blocking my blurred vision, he kept his hands clamped around my neck and began trying to hook my legs with his own, as if hoping to suck me into himself, oblivious to his own need to survive. He was all revenge now, the manipulator out of tricks, his only remaining goal to make sure that in death, as in life, he didn’t go alone or without making somebody pay. I ran my hands along the sides of his face and pressed both my thumbs as hard as I could into his eyes, feeling the heat expanding in my lungs as my oxygen neared depletion.

The effect of my efforts seemed negligible at first, and far, far too slow. Norm began to thrash, his head tossing from side to side, which only made me hang on tighter. The water was a swirling screen of whitewash, subtly highlighted by the muted colors of the fireworks display. But my vision began to dim as I ran out of air, and slowly I felt a numbness overtake me.

At which point, Bouch desperately released my throat to grab at my hands.

Stimulated by the sudden freedom, I placed one foot firmly against his chest and pushed with all my remaining strength, tearing myself loose of him.